Speak Mouth to Mouth, Poems by Stuart Friebert
Stuart Friebert’s poems in Speak Mouth to Mouth give voice to what is unsayable, in terms both metaphysical and purely physical:
Voice box, in front of the windpipe,
just below the hyoid bone, connected
to the pharynx above, the pipe below,
through which every breath of air you
take must pass...
Friebert’s rugged lines never fail to speak, firmly and eloquently.
Sample Poems by Stuart Friebert
Praise for Stuart Friebert’s Earlier Work
“Here language seems to be an emotional minefield, where the path not traveled, the words left unspoken, are as important as what is revealed. Moments, powerful and subtle at once, abound in this collection.”—Harvard Review
Born in Wisconsin, Stuart Friebert spent an undergraduate year in Germany as one of the first U.S. exchange students after WW II (1949-50). He returned to complete a Ph.D. in German at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and began teaching German language and literature at Mt. Holyoke, after which he moved to teach at Harvard, until eventually settling at Oberlin College in 1961. He continued teaching German till, in the mid-70s, with help from colleagues, he founded Oberlin's Writing Program, which he directed till retiring in 1997. Along the way, with colleagues, he co-founded Field Magazine, later the Field Translation Series and Oberlin College Press. A recent collection of poems, Funeral Pie, co-won The Four Way Book Award, and his eighth volume of translations, Selected Poems of the Czech poet, Sylva Fischerova, co-translated with the author herself, will appear in the fall of 2009. Having started writing prose in 2000, Friebert has published a number of stories, as well as essays and memoir-pieces.
ISBN: 9781934999448, 96 pages, $18.00